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"You're always the victim or the hero in your own story." ~ X

One of the most fascinating things about human beings is that we rarely experience reality as it is. We experience it as we perceive it.

When we look back at a situation, we don't always see what actually happened. We see what happened through the lens of our emotions, assumptions, experiences, and blind spots.

Your perception of what happened is not always what happened.

Maybe that's why we're almost always the good person in our own narration. We tell the story in a way that makes our intentions obvious and our mistakes understandable. We explain away our actions because, to us, they make sense.

I offended a friend recently, for days, I was upset that they hadn't reached out to me. In my version of the story, I was the one who had been wronged, then we finally had a conversation.

That was when it dawned on me that I had been the villain, not by intention, but by my actions.

The impact of what I did mattered more than the innocence of what I meant. And until I stepped outside my own perspective and listened to theirs, I genuinely couldn't see it.

It is incredibly easy to become the hero of your own story, to arrange the facts in a way that vindicates you, to highlight your intentions while minimizing the hurt you caused. We all do it, often without realizing.

Dearest reader, the thing is that growth begins the moment you become willing to ask, "What if my version isn't the complete version?"

Humility is accepting that you can be a good person and still be wrong, that you can love someone and still hurt them, that your intentions can be pure while your actions leave wounds.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is allow someone else's perspective to challenge your own.

Because every story has more than one side to it.

@favvy_Okwans🖤.